VC Deals Only. Weekend Edition. Yamaha Motor Ventures & Laboratory Silicon Valley Leads Series A Funding Round for Advanced Farm Technologies

VC Deals

SpotHero, the Chicago-based company that has developed an on-demand parking app, has raised $50 million in a Series D round led by Macquarie Capital. SpotHero has raised $118 million to date. The new capital will be used to expand its reach in the 300 U.S. and Canadian cities where it is already operating, build out its digital platform and strengthen partnerships with mobility companies. More 

Digital Medical Tech, an Annapolis, MD-based solution provider for hospital management and asset tracking, raised $1.5m in seed funding. The company intends to use the funds to launch a nationwide engagement program for targeting healthcare providers and potential partnerships. Founded in 2016 by CEO Matthew Nicholson, Digital Medical Tech  enables health systems to proactively track medical equipment and devices via a Bluetooth platform. The company’s real-time location system monitors and manages medical assets while requiring less infrastructure and shorter installation time compared to other tracking solutions. More 

Boll & Branch, which sells sustainably sourced sheets, pillows, mattresses and towels, is announcing that it has raised $100 million in a strategic investment from L Catterton’s Flagship Buyout Fund. This looks like a big change from the company’s previous approach to funding. It was self-funded for its first two years (resulting in what CEO Scott Tannen described as “a lot of maxed out credit cards and five mortgages on my house”), and even when it started looking at venture capital, it only raised a total of $12 million from a single institutional backer, Silas Capital. More

Funding Circle, a San Francisco, CA-based small business loans platform, closed its first $198m asset-backed securitization (ABS) of US small business loans originated through its system. The deal marks the debut of Funding Circle’s US securitization sponsorship capability, and is the fifth securitization of Funding Circle business loans globally. The transaction is rated by two ratings agencies, with its senior tranche earning an A- (sf) rating from Kroll Bond Rating Agency and an A3 (sf) rating from Moody’s Investors Service. More

Ethos, the company making simple, ethical life insurance, today announced it raised a $60 million Series C financing led by GV (formerly Google Ventures). This financing follows major revenue and customer growth, and supports Ethos’ mission to make life insurance coverage accessible for millions of families in the U.S. In addition to GV, Goldman Sachs is a new participant alongside existing investors Sequoia Capital and Accel, bringing the total funding to-date to more than $100 million. More

A British energy firm lighting up homes in Africa with pay-as-you-go solar power has secured £40m to extend its reach to Asia with the help of Japan’s Mitsubishi. The conglomerate has taken a stake in off-grid solar company BBOXX through the start-up’s latest funding round, which will power the Africa-focused company deeper into Asia. The funds will also help BBOXX, which operates in Rwanda, Kenya, Togo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to break into new African markets, where an estimated one in three people live without reliable access to electricity. More

Luma Health, a San Francisco startup developing a patient engagement platform for health systems, today announced that it’s raised $16 million in series B funding led by PeakSpan Capital, with participation from U.S. Venture Partners and strategic investors Cisco and the Texas Medical Center. The capital infusion brings Luma Health’s total raised to $25.7 million, which cofounder and CEO Adnan Iqbal said will be used to “scale and meet the demands” of its customers.  More

Yamaha Motor Ventures & Laboratory Silicon Valley (“YMVSV”), the strategic business development and investment arm of Yamaha Motor Co., Ltd. (“YMC”) (Tokyo: 7272), today announced it led the Series A funding round for Advanced Farm Technologies (AFT), a developer of robotic farming equipment that includes the T-6 robotic strawberry harvester. Leveraging the $100 million Yamaha Motor Exploratory Fund (the “Fund”), the AFT investment reflects YMVSV’s focus on disruptive technological solutions that meet the challenges of the global food supply chain. More

Homee, a Tampa, Florida-based startup developing an on-demand home services platform for homeowners and property managers, today announced that it’s raised $15 million in series B funding led by Forte Ventures, with participation from Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures, Active Capital Partners, Florida Funders, Deepwork Capital, and Engage. The capital infusion, which also saw contributions from strategic investors The Hartford, State Farm Ventures, and Ferguson Ventures, brings Homee’s total raised to nearly $30 million. More 

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Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience. 

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.  

New Funds 

Kaszek Ventures, the investment firm that has been one of the primary architects of the recent boom in startup financing and growth in Latin America, has just raised $600 million across two new funds. The new commitments (raised in roughly two months) put Kaszek’s total capital under management at roughly $1 billion, making the firm the first local early-stage investor to hit that milestone. More  

Pharmaceutical Co., a Tokyo, Japan-based specialty pharma company with a focus on oncology, is to invest up to US$30m in Remiges Biopharma Fund II, LP, a biopharma venture capital fund formed by Remiges Ventures, Inc.The company had invested the same amount in the Remiges BioPharma Fund I established in 2014, using it as a platform for open innovation with academia, research institutions, and startups in the early stages of development in the US and Europe. More 

Exits  

Apparel retailer Forever 21 is considering filing for bankruptcy as efforts to restructure its debt run dry, a person familiar with the situation told CNBC. The retailer has been exploring restructuring options to shore up its liquidity as it struggles with its business, CNBC previously reported. Those efforts, though, have stalled, making a bankruptcy more likely. More

VC Deals Only. Weekend Edition. D&D Pharmatech has raised $137.1 million to advance treatments for neurodegenerative diseases and fibrosis

VC Deals

Proterra has authorized shares to raise $75 million, a new round of funding that would push the electric bus maker’s valuation past $1 billion.The company authorized the sale of 10,857,762 shares at a price of $6.91 in a Series 8 round, according to a securities filing that was obtained by the Prime Unicorn Index, a company that tracks the performance of private U.S. companies. More 

Wheels Up, the private aviation start-up that counts Tom Brady and Serena Williams as members, said Friday it completed a $128 million round of funding that values the company $1.1 billion. The funding marks an escalation in the air war between private aviation players to become leaders in a new era of consolidation and technological change that is remaking the industry.  More 

AI-powered search venture Lucidworks has raised $100 million from Francisco Partners and TPG Sixth Street Partners, the company announced. The funding amounts to nearly as much (a combined $109 million) as the twelve-year-old company has raised since it was founded in 2007. Its last raise took place in May 2018 – a $50 million Series E led by Top Tier Capital Partners. So this round is precisely double its last raise. More 

Creating backups for massive enterprise deployments may feel like a solved problem, but for the most part, we’re still talking about complex hardware and software setups.Clumio, which is coming out of stealth today, wants to modernize enterprise data protection by eliminating the on-premise hardware in favor of a flexible, SaaS-style cloud-based backup solution.  

For the first time. Clumio also announced that it has raised a total of $51 million in a Series A and B round since it was founded in 2017. More 

VeriSIM Life, a San Francisco, CA-based company that is building digital animal and human simulations to avoid unnecessary drug testing in animals, raised $5.2M in funding. The round was co-led by OCA Ventures and Serra Ventures with participation from Susa Ventures, Intel Capital, Stage Venture Partners, Village Global, Twin, and Loup Ventures. More 

Imagine a moving tower made of huge cement bricks weighing 35 metric tons. The movement of these massive blocks is powered by wind or solar power plants and is a way to store the energy those plants generate. Software controls the movement of the blocks automatically, responding to changes in power availability across an electric grid to charge and discharge the power that’s being generated. 

The development of this technology is the culmination of years of work at Idealab, the Pasadena, Calif.-based startup incubator, and Energy Vault, the company it spun out to commercialize the technology, has just raised $110 million from SoftBank Vision Fund to take its next steps in the world. More 

D&D Pharmatech has raised $137.1 million to advance treatments for neurodegenerative diseases and fibrosis. The series B will enable one D&D subsidiary to run phase 2 trials in Alzheimer's and Parkinson’s as well as set up another business to take a treatment for chronic pancreatitis and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) into human testing. More 

Renovacor picked up $11 million in series A financing from Novartis’ venture arm, Broadview Ventures, BioAdvance, New Leaf Venture Partners and Innogest Capital to push forward a gene therapy that could ward off disease progression in this group of patients, sparing them from drastic measures such as a heart transplant. More

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This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.

New Funds

Croatia is about to get a shot in the arm, however, with the arrival of a home-grown dedicated VC fund, Fil Rouge Capital, which plans to invest in young entrepreneurs, startups and scale-up companies, as well as establishing a local entrepreneurial ecosystem in Croatia.

The fund is fully operational as of last month, having received funding commitments of more than €42 million ($46.6 million), demonstrating a strong interest of investors in the growing startup economy there. More

Construction technology is a growing sector, which is why Brick & Mortar Ventures has raised a $97 million fund to invest in both hardware and software for construction-related industries. The San Francisco venture fund was founded by construction tech investment veteran Darren Bechtel and is backed by high-profile corporate funding sources. More

IPOs

Luckin Coffee Inc., the chain trying to take on Starbucks Corp. in China, plunged the most since its U.S. trading debut in May after it issued earnings for the first time as a public company.Luckin, which is based in China and listed in the U.S, said it was taking a hit from trade tensions and the slowing Chinese economy as it races to open stores and burns cash to build market share in China’s nascent coffee market. 

The shares sank 17% to $20.44 in New York on Wednesday. The shares were up 44% from the $17-a-share initial public offering price through Tuesday’s close. More 

Samoyed Holdings Limited (Samoyed), a financial technology service firm that focuses on China’s credit card repayment market, withdrew its planned initial public offering (IPO) in the US, according to its latest filing with the US SEC. “The company has determined not to pursue the sale of the securities covered by the Registration Statement at this time due to unfavorable market conditions,” the company said. 

The registration statement has never been declared effective by the US SEC and the company has not sold any securities yet, it added.  More 

Postmates plans to make its IPO paperwork public in September, TechCrunch has learned. Despite previous reports indicating the on-demand delivery company is seeking an M&A exit, sources close to the matter say Postmates is on track to go complete an initial public offering this year. More 

Exits 

Cryptocurrency firm Coinbase has acquired the custody business of Xapo, a service best known for storing Bitcoins in a vault under a Swiss mountain. The acquisition comes as part of an aggressive push by Coinbase to expand its custody services, and could result in the San Francisco company storing over 5% of all Bitcoins in circulation.

Coinbase paid $55 million for Xapo and, as a result of the deal, now has over $7 billion in crypto assets under management, according to a person familiar with the deal. The person, who was not authorized to speak for attribution, said the purchase came after Coinbase outbid investment giant Fidelity. More 

VMware today confirmed that it is in talks to acquire software development platform Pivotal Software, the service best known for commercializing the open-source Cloud Foundry platform. The proposed transaction would see VMware acquire all outstanding Pivotal Class A stock for $15 per share, a significant markup over Pivotal’s current share price (which unsurprisingly shot up right after the announcement).  More

ICT News

Two major U.S. carriers, AT&T and T-Mobile, announced this morning a plan to team up to protect their respective customer bases from the scourge of scam robocalls. The two companies will today begin to roll out new cross-network call authentication technology based on the STIR/SHAKEN standards — a sort of universal caller ID system designed to stop illegal caller ID spoofing. More

Samoyed Holdings Limited (Samoyed), a financial technology service firm that focuses on China’s credit card repayment market, withdrew its planned initial public offering (IPO) in the US, according to its latest filing with the US SEC. “The company has determined not to pursue the sale of the securities covered by the Registration Statement at this time due to unfavorable market conditions,” the company said. The registration statement has never been declared effective by the US SEC and the company has not sold any securities yet, it added.

Read more at: https://www.dealstreetasia.com/stories/samoyed-cancels-us-ipo-149840/ 

Samoyed Holdings Limited (Samoyed), a financial technology service firm that focuses on China’s credit card repayment market, withdrew its planned initial public offering (IPO) in the US, according to its latest filing with the US SEC. “The company has determined not to pursue the sale of the securities covered by the Registration Statement at this time due to unfavorable market conditions,” the company said. The registration statement has never been declared effective by the US SEC and the company has not sold any securities yet, it added.

Read more at: https://www.dealstreetasia.com/stories/samoyed-cancels-us-ipo-149840/  

Samoyed Holdings Limited (Samoyed), a financial technology service firm that focuses on China’s credit card repayment market, withdrew its planned initial public offering (IPO) in the US, according to its latest filing with the US SEC. “The company has determined not to pursue the sale of the securities covered by the Registration Statement at this time due to unfavorable market conditions,” the company said.

Read more at: https://www.dealstreetasia.com/stories/samoyed-cancels-us-ipo-14984

Samoyed Holdings Limited (Samoyed), a financial technology service firm that focuses on China’s credit card repayment market, withdrew its planned initial public offering (IPO) in the US, according to its latest filing with the US SEC. “The company has determined not to pursue the sale of the securities covered by the Registration Statement at this time due to unfavorable market conditions,” the company said.

Read more at: https://www.dealstreetasia.com/stories/samoyed-cancels-us-ipo-14984

Amsterdam-based Dott raises another €30 million to roll out its safe e-bikes and scooters

Amsterdam-based Dott, the European micro-mobility company has raised a €30 million Series A funding round to fund the production and market launch of its new e-bikes and e-scooters to replace cars in urban centres. The investment was co-led by existing investors EQT Ventures, and the South African multinational Naspers with participation from Axel Springer Digital Ventures, Felix Capital, FJ Labs, U-Start Club, and angel investors.

Just founded in 2018, the startup previously raised a €20 million round in December, and we just featured it as one of our 10 mobility startups to watch in 2019. Dott’s scooters are built to last and be safer than other e-scooters on the market. They can run for several kilometers without running out of juice, have bigger wheels, reliable road grip, and a double brake system.

The funding will be used to accelerate the market launch of Dott’s custom-designed products. Dott has already completed the design of its e-bikes, and pre-production is in progress. Mostly produced in Europe and assembled in France, Dott’s e-bike will be launched within months in cities in Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands, while the startup’s e-scooters will be available by the end of the year.

Dott is currently operating in Brussels, Paris and Lyon, along with a pilot in Milan. Along with a strong collaboration with municipalities and local mobility ecosystems, Dott’s scooters are designed to be sustainable, with swappable batteries and a commitment to repair scooters instead of replacing them.

Dott is also the first company to offer comprehensive insurance coverage to its users in France and Belgium (coming soon in Italy) in partnership with the insurtech startup Zego and La Parisienne Assurances. This insurance covers both personal injury and third-party liability. The insurance is automatically integrated in the sign-up process for new riders and before the next trips for existing riders, with no additional cost.

“We’ve shown in the first months that we can offer a true alternative in European cities, taking the lead both in terms of sustainability and best user experience,” said Maxim Romain, CEO and co-founder of Dott. “We think we have a winning combination now, starting with our great results in Paris, along with scooters designed for shared mobility and fully integrated operations from start. Our aim is now to accelerate, take the full lead in cities where we operate, expand to new countries and launch our own Dott e-bike as well as the two next generations of e-scooters in the coming months.”

“The dense nature of cities in Europe is ideal for e-scooter and e-bike sharing for short commutes – most trips are much more efficiently covered than with a car,” said Martin Tschopp, COO of Naspers Ventures. “Dott has experienced good traction in its first few months of operation and is leading with a local, sustainable and safety-first mindset, which is appealing to Naspers.”

Source. EU Startups, Mary Loritz, July 4, 2019

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This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.